THE TWIN CITIES hosted An Event Apart last week, featuring leading speakers in web design, development, web typography and experience design. AEA inspired my design practice and provided opportunities to meet many new friends in the design community.

Milwaukee friends Kris Hunt and Paula Clemons attended AEA and invited me to ride along from Milwaukee to Minneapolis to test out their new Subaru (Road trip!). We ended the trip meeting Kevin Farner at Target Field at the Twins vs. Red Sox game.

Patrick Rhone and his wife Bethany invited me to stay with them in St. Paul while in town, and we had a great time together. I loved their 1885 victorian home, their cute daughter and got to experience a slice of life in the Twin Cities.

But best of all, I thoroughly enjoyed talking nerdy Mac, pen and book stuff with Patrick and meeting fellow nerd and St. Paul Pioneer Press tech writer Julio Oheda-Zapata during my down time.

Sketchnoting AEA

I was brought in to sketchnote the event by Jeffrey Zeldman and the AEA team, and it went well. With each sketchnoting assignment, the challenge is to find a balance between too little and too much information on the page. My approach is to capture ideas with type, images and text, finding a mix of those elements as I capture presentations in real time.

Enjoy & Share

I hope you enjoy my AEA Minneapolis Sketchnotes. Feel free to use the embedding features of Flickr to include favorite images in your own blog posts and feel free to share these on Twitter. Sketchnotes are made to be enjoyed!

Reader Comments (4)

Did you create the sketch notes as the talks where going on, or did you create quick notes (or record) each talk then create sketch notes after the event? have tried sketch noting through seminars and conferences before, but end up scribbling messy notes throughout trying to keep up with whats going on while absorbing the info at the same time.

Steve, thanks for the message! These sketchnotes were all created on the fly, real time at the event.

As for the title pages for each speaker, those I often did in the break period before they began to speak, so I could focus while they spoke on the content of their talks.

I think the key to this is:

1. Being very selective about what you capture - not everything said is here, intentionally. I listen for things that resonate with me or seem valuable and focus on those, letting other things go. Sketchnotes aren't meant to be completely comprehensive, rather they are created to capture my impressions of the talk in a clear, interesting way for myself and others.

2. Practice with videos to get used to being selective. Nothing helps more than practice and a great way is with a TED talk video or even an audio podcast. Experiment with techniques and listening for the most interesting ideas so when you get to a live event your listening skills are better.

It's a challenge but you get better each time you try it. Also be sure to check out my Sketchnote Army site, where I feature others' sketchnote work, to see the wide variety and personalities of the sketchnotes being produced these days.